Reality bytes

Reality bytes

The following is from Bystander, a contributor to The Magistrate's Blog.

"We worked our socks off during this week's sitting. We dealt with a mix of remands, bail applications, sentences, committals. It was a late sitting as the police kept on bringing in new custody cases. I asked the usher how we were doing at about a quarter past three and she told me we still had eight downstairs in the cells. We couldn't get help from another bench because there weren't enough security staff to work two courtrooms. One man came in from overnight custody and his solicitor went through the motions of applying for bail. We saw that the 32-year-old had 140 previous convictions. The only gap in his record was during the two-and-a-half years he had spent in prison. As I type, he is sitting in a cell somewhere.